MALAWI: Drought and HIV have had a devastating effect on the Southern African state, Bill Corcoran reports.
Maria Binda is desperate. The mother-of-one has been forced to risk the hazardous harvesting of water lily tubers from Malawi's crocodile-infested Shire River to feed herself and her child
The small dark-coloured tubers have little nutritional value and are only harvested under desperate circumstances.
New government figures show that up to 5 million Malawians will need food assistance during the lean season next January - an increase of about 700,000 on the number relief agencies expected to have to feed across the drought-stricken country.
"The tubers are difficult to get, since you must follow the stem of the lily down to the bottom and you can only get one or two at a time, as you run out of breath. You have to get someone to watch out for crocodiles and hippos, they are so dangerous," she said.
"Two of my neighbours were taken [ by crocodiles] last month, but without food this is what we have to do. There are no crops this year because of the drought."
The food crisis affecting Malawi is replicated in five other southern African countries and in total more than 12 million people face chronic food shortages between now and the spring harvest.
Data from the Malawian ministry of health points to a big rise in malnutrition across the country. Food distribution centres in the south, the worst affected area, have recorded large increases in the number of unregistered people seeking food aid.
"Rising maize prices and malnutrition rates now mean that more people than before will need help to survive the lean season," says Mike Sackett, the World Food Programme's regional director for southern Africa.
Food prices - which usually increase between December and harvest time in March/April, when maize is scarcest - have already risen to levels normally seen at the height of the lean season in January.
Thousands of desperate Malawians turned up at the Mankhokwe food distribution station in the Nsange District last Tuesday looking for rations to stave off starvation over the coming month.
Although the World Food Programme has been able to provide food aid up to the present, officials say that a funding shortfall of at least $70 million will have to be met by donors if the programme is to continue to be effective.
Weak from hunger and exhausted from standing beneath the blistering sun, Maria Binda told The Irish Times that without food aid, she would probably starve.
"I have nothing, no food or crops. Two of my children are dead from disease and my remaining child is very hungry. I need the food," she said as she stood in line outside the food distribution centre run by Goal at Mankhokwe.
In the Nsange district's 18 other distribution centres, food aid was provided to almost 120,000 people during September. That number is expected to rise to about 165,000 people this month.
At the height of Malawi's lean season the World Food Programme expects that it will have to feed nearly 2.9 million people in the southern part of the country.
The shortage of food is compounded by poor infrastructure and by the HIV/Aids epidemic, which is estimated to have infected 14.4 per cent of Malawi's adult population - almost 1.9 million people.
It is expected that about 80,000 people will die from Aids in Malawi this year alone and that a further 110,000 will be infected with HIV. Many of those being infected are young men and women who, if they had remained in good health, would have been able to tend their small plots of land.
In contrast to the Niger government's refusal to accept the scale of the problem, Malawi's president Dr Bingu wa Mutharika recently told the UN General Assembly that his country was in "dire straits".
Malawi's newly appointed agriculture minister, Uladi B. Mussa, went as far as to say that if donors did not come up with the necessary funding, "hundreds of thousands of Malawians would die".
As always, the very young are the hardest hit. Figures compiled by the ministry of health show that more than 1,000 acutely malnourished children were admitted to hospitals in August this year, compared to 775 children in the same month in 2004.
In 76 nutrition rehabilitation units in the northern, central and southern regions, the number of admissions during August this year rose by 15 per cent, 41 per cent and 24 per cent respectively, compared to the previous year.
Little James Juga will be one of the babies making up the next set of child hunger statistics: the 18-month-old lost his mother to HIV/Aids last Saturday.
James, who is severely malnourished, is also infected with the virus.
His grandmother took him to the small St Montfort Hospital near Nchalo village in the hope that a feeding programme would resuscitate his ailing body.
"I am old, so I cannot work hard. This is his only chance," she said.
Although 85 per cent of Malawians earn their living through subsistence farming, only 20,000 out of 9.6 million hectares of agricultural land is irrigated.